Better than a poke in the eye with a wet fish

What happens next?

In a couple of days, Australia will have a new government and, barring an upset of almost incomprehensible magnitude, it will be a conservative government with Tony Abbott as Prime Minister. It is a most unsettling prospect, but what will be will be.

What’s important is what happens next.

Abbott seems like almost the worst imaginable person to be given the leadership of the country, and I dislike the Liberal Party on a visceral, or perhaps molecular level, but the most unsettling part is that Australia is about to elect a government that has kept its plans for after the election secret. There is very little in the way of policy details beyond three-word slogans, and until today we have not been told how the promises they have made will be paid for. Even tonight we only have a costing document that provides a line item for each spending/saving measure but no information about the underlying assumptions.

It’s an appalling indictment on the Australian electorate that people are prepared to vote, sight-unseen, for what will likely be a massive swing to the right in almost every area of public policy. It’s an even worse indictment on the Australian Labor Party, which has squandered its own political capital and led many Australians to regard it as a hopelessly dysfunctional, visionless and talentless rabble, not through poor government over the last six years (far from it – the ALP has driven some key policy reforms) but through internecine squabbles and almost comically poor communication skills.

The Australian electorate hates the Labor Party so much they are prepared to have Tony Abbott – a man that most people think is a sort of intellectually dim, semi-deranged religious zealot – as their PM. Most people, when asked, think Abbott will be a terrible PM. And yet they are prepared to elect him purely out of spite directed at the ALP.

They say oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose them. Well, indeed: this particular opposition leader has not had to do anything more complex than remain vertical and robotically repeat ‘stoptheboatsendthetaxbuildtheroadsofthetwentyfirstcentury’ and he’s headed for a landslide victory.

So Abbott’s going to win. What happens next depends on a few factors. First, the scale of his majority and, particularly, the numbers in the Senate.

If there’s a big swing, Abbott could be looking at a 30- or 40-seat buffer in the House of Reps. That will take three or four terms of government for the ALP to whittle away, if it can at all: Coalition governments all the way through to the mid-2020s. It’s turtles all the way down. In the Senate, things are looking a wee bit brighter – with a bit of luck, the Greens vote will hold up, the byzantine preference deals won’t elect too many right-wing crazies, and the Coalition won’t have a workable majority in the upper house.

The Greens have said they will vote against almost every part of the Coalition’s platform: they will continue to stand up for asylum seekers, welfare recipients and wage earners, and against big business and the top end of town. In other words, they will act on well-articulated principles, not based on political expediency. Maybe it’s time for the ALP to join them?

Perhaps this defeat will be the catalyst that forces the ALP to reexamine its place in the Australian political landscape, and relocate its ideological soul. A party of the left, standing up for ordinary people, protecting and extending Medicare, social security, progressive social policies – you know, the old ALP. And maybe they could discover that the Greens, who have become successful by attracting the votes of disaffected leftist voters, aren’t the real enemy: the tories are.

Together, Labor and the Greens could yet provide an effective brake on at least some of the craziest plans Abbott, Hockey and Robb have in their secret dossier, and in the process they might just rediscover what it is they stand for.

It’s probably too early to begin the post-mortem. What’s likely is that there will be a lot of initial rage and horror that we have our worst ever Prime Minister, that over time this will die down. Look at Queensland – despite a government that ranks close to Bjelke-Peterson as Queensland”s worst ever government, they are still streets ahead in the polls. But we know that can change quickly, as it did in Victoria – there seems to be a minimum time that the electorate is prepared to give.

The key time to get active is not next week – but year two, leading into year three of an Abbott government.

The way I see it if there’s an international recovery, we will have a medium to long term LNP government. That’s the luck that Howard-Costello rode – there would have been a huge recession in 2005 but the mining boom intervened to allow 5 more years of growth. And Howard and Costello used the time and the proceeds of the mining boom to reintroduce middle class welfare and make a huge structural deficit that Labor failed to address. It tore up yet another issue where there was bipartisanship – that of means tested welfare – and sadly Australia was one of the few countries to do this (democracies everywhere try to buy the middle class).

On the other hand, if the economic collapse of India, Indonesia and Brazil leads to a 2nd (and harder to deal with) global financial crisis, then all bets are off – and the LNP are shocking and clueless at governing when times are tough – they are like the Tea Party who preach restraint when theres a democrat President but let Republican presidents overspend like crazy so their corporations benefit.

The LNP is deeply divided – they covered that up until the election – but it will come out. If Abbott does internationally embarrassing things (it will happen) then there’s a few Liberals waiting to pounce. His child care scheme will not happen.

The key question for me though is what happens to Labor and the Greens. Here’s a few possibilities :-

1. The Greens move to a more middle of the road centre-left party and make their goal to eventually replace Labor.
2. The left of the ALP leaves the ALP and merges with the Greens – there is going to be a lot of post mortem about refugees, and some of the left have been put in an impossible position.
3. The ALP reforms and finally 40 years too late purges the cancer of the NSW Right. Frankly until they do this they do not deserve to be elected.

There’s also the question of the tactics and policies of Labor. For years they”ve been dominated by the Right and their only goals seems to be to “do capitalism better” and to “keep the other bastards out.”. When you have problems like global warming this is an untenable and unsupportable strategy.

That dreadful right wing Institute of Public Affairs that is making demands on our next government, pointed out that the most fundamental and sweeping changes made in Australia in the last fifty years occurred in the first 100 days of the Whitlam government – including medicare and free tertiary education. A lot of people have surmised that our next government has a detailed fightback 2 plan that they intend to implement very quickly should they have control of the senate.

For Labors next cycle of government, instead of coming in and launching enquiry and national forums, they need to have detailed plans for the core issues and use the early grace period to get them done. Instead of implementing things with 6 year wind up plans they need to be implemented and in place – and supported. They then become much harder to undo. I would suggest the big issues to implement are i) carbon policy ii) fixing education (reimplementing Gonski) iii) mental health scheme (they’ve done disability – mental health has been crapped on) and iv) health and paying for an ageing population (for which there aren’t easy or any popular answers).

The big issue for Labor to work out is global warming. They can no longer try to play both sides of the fence – the situation is getting worse and worse as we dilly dally and delay. The coal mining industry has to be made redundant – they now have the ethics of the smoking industry (key Mirabella supporters). Labor has to use the time in opposition to undertake community education on a grand scale free from policy – there is huge lack of understanding of the delay between carbon dioxide concentration and actual warming. There are easy ways to educate about this.

Blah blah blah – I could obviously go on and on raving. But they key thing for me is this is a long haul that needs to wind up – not an angry initial response, nasty post-mortems and then calm acceptance of an unacceptable government. But I predict anger, rage and nasty post-mortems…. I reckon best would be to personally fast forward the next six months – and then start the hard work.